OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Wait, I've not heard this one - does ChatGPT garbage use dashes the way I just did?
Are LLMs using my own writing style?
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Sci-Fi a weird genre to have effectively adopted neo-Luddite tendencies.
Surely this has been a powerful theme in science fiction for well over half a century?
Science fiction authors, or at least classic science fiction authors, have been asking "What if AI are bad?" for a very long time, and while I could easily make a list of classic SF stories with pro-AI or pro-robot messages, the list with anti-AI or anti-robot messages is very long too.
As such I would intuitively expect SF fans to be more likely to have strong feelings in both directions, both strongly pro and strongly anti.
(Disclaimer: I do feel some hesitation in describing WorldCon attendees and the current crop of Hugo voters as 'SF fans'.)
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I think the key here is to trust tradition, which means some establishments but not others. Dumbledore is the central authority figure in the book and he is to be trusted implicitly. Where establishments are to be defied, it's because those establishments are modernising, bumbling bureaucrats. Dumbledore and Umbridge are both figures of institutional authority, but only Dumbledore is a figure of tradition. Umbridge is a come-lately, an interloper appointed by an authority that is both ignorant and interfering with something beyond its proper scope.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Harry does in fact use two of them, right? In Deathly Hallows he uses both Imperius and Cruciatus. The only one he doesn't use is the Killing Curse, and even that seems a bit hollow considering that the conclusion of the novel hinges on him using magic to kill the villain.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I think Harry Potter is an interesting example of the author not understanding her own text.
Or, well, it's an extraordinarily interesting text because of how widely and inconsistently it has been interpreted.
Structurally, as it were, the bones of Harry Potter are conservative or Tory. This is probably inherited a lot from the boarding school novel that it imitates, but it can't all be accounted for that way. Regardless of the origin, Potter is a series about legitimate institutional authority, tradition, family, and virtue. The demagogic populist Voldemort and the inept bureaucracy of the Ministry must both fold before these things. Harry is exuberant to the point of disobedience sometimes, but that is the necessary energy of a young man who is being trained into a stalwart defender of the moral order. Note the exaltation of marriage and family as well - Harry's significance comes from his parents, while Voldemort is from an orphanage after being abandoned by his mother.
J. K. Rowling, however, is a liberal feminist and a Labour woman, and when asked she interprets her own work along other lines - tolerance, feminism, anti-racism, a plea for equality, and so on. There are elements of the text you can read like this (anti-muggle-blood prejudice is certainly mocked), but on the whole this has never come off as terribly convincing. Hermione's experiments with civil rights activism, for instance, are generally played for laughs, and no character really takes a serious interest in large-scale change.
Finally there's the progressive fan read of it. Though the books are arguably pretty conservative, like Kirk/Spock, Harry Potter slash was massively influential and I don't think you can write a history of fandom in the 20th century while omitting it. That goes hand in hand with the interpretation of Hogwarts as something like a giant closet, and eventually the whole Resistance-coded reading of Potter that we've all seen widely mocked. Despite my tone here, I don't actually want to treat this reading with contempt. What a book becomes 'in the wild' can vary considerably from what the text actually says on the surface, and from what the author thinks it's about, and the huge explosion of creativity and fan interest in this version of Potter suggests that, however unintentional, there have been resonances here.
(I theorise that it's to do with the academic setting - the classic boarding school novel is set in a world where secondary and higher education are genuinely Tory, but the world of the 21st century, especially in America, is one where higher education has become a progressive bastion, so now the idea of the authority of the school and the values it seeks to impart to those in its care reads as progressive.)
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I don't think that's what people who make that argument believe - Tolkien's convictions are too transparent and visible for that. I think it's more Death-of-the-Author, that regardless of what Tolkien personally believed, the text can (and implicitly should) be 'queered'.
I've encountered this method in, for instance, academic biblical criticism, where the exegete says quite openly that what they are doing is 'breaking open' or 'queering' the text to find a meaning that was certainly not intended by the human author, but is powerful and liberatory in its own way, and so on.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
You don't even have to go the Mormons - I believe some people have linked that prophecy to the idea of the Wandering Jew.
That said, as a Christian I don't think your interpretation of that claim is constraining. This is one way to read that verse but it is not clear to me that it necessarily excludes all others.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Christianity isn't so much about 'things being true' but getting into a mindset where 'it doesn't matter if it's true or not, I believe it'
I think you would find this claim very hard to square with even simply the Bible itself, much less the subsequent writings or even behaviour of Christians.
Christianity might be false - we may be, in Paul's words, of all people most to be pitied - but it is absolutely making truth claims, and those truth claims matter. They matter to Christians. The theology that you blithely dismiss can only exist because Christians care about this.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I'm not sure how the procedure for electing a pope bears on the truth of Christianity as such? Even leaving aside that Christianity could be completely true even at the same time that Catholicism is not (or rather, particular Catholic doctrines could be false and Catholic institutional practice ramshackle and poorly-grounded), I'm not at all clear on why you would an apostolic constitution of 1996 must be eternal and unchangeable even vis-a-vis Catholicism. The process by which the church elects a pope belongs to the freedom of the church - Catholics do not believe that it has been handed down by God. They believe that God allows them, as an institution, to decide the next pope.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
My experience was probably atypical, because I went to a boys' school. It had a parallel institution, a girls' school, and the idea was that they would occasionally crossover for social events. The girls' school was both much older and much larger, so it had a significantly larger student base.
I remember at social events and dances, what usually happened was that the boys were maybe 20-25% of the room, and they would all bunker up defensively in a corner, unsure of the female strangers who made up the rest of the room, and likewise the girls would eye all the boys nervously. There was a large gap between them and neither side crossed it.
This was before smartphones so I don't think you can blame it on that. This is all millennials. It's just that when your social scene is extremely segregated by gender, you're naturally going to cluster with your friends whom you trust, and nobody wants to draw attention to himself or herself by being the first one to try to cross the gulf.
(There was, for what it's worth, zero mention of homosexuality on either side - neither ironic nor serious. I attribute this mostly to them being conservative religious private schools. I don't think I fully understood the concept of homosexuality until after I had graduated. In many ways I wish for that innocence back.)
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I tend to agree about cultural politics - I was cringeing inwardly when Penny Wong and Albo both doubled down on some of the indigenous stuff during their victory speeches. The Voice would seem to show that even when the Opposition itself is unpopular, there is very little appetite in Australia for SJ-tinted institutional change.
However, as you say, the American or Trumpist style does not work in Australia at all, and is experienced as both alienating and repulsive by most Australians. I think we've seen some of that with Jacinta Price, for instance, or Dutton's failed experiment with 'government efficiency' ideas, or with the completely unsuccessful Trumpet of Patriots. There is a strong element of resistance to, or at the very least skepticism of, SJ ideas in Australia, but Trumpism is not the way to access it. They will need to find a more distinctively Australian way of articulating the criticism.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
For what it's worth, there's pretty much zero likelihood that the Coalition would have slashed immigration either. The Coalition tend to go hard on illegal immigration while increasing legal, skilled immigration. It is effectively bipartisan consensus that Australia needs large-scale immigration, and they don't even disagree that much about the criteria for it (i.e. they like skilled professionals). Immigration fights tend to be around the edges, about illegal immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers - an incredibly small proportion of the total.
I'd bear in mind that it has been this lopsided or worse in the past. Labor have just won 85 seats, possibly a few more once counting finishes, but for comparison, Labor won 83 seats in the 2007 landslide, and then the Coalition won 90 seats in their own 2013 landslide. The Coalition won 94 seats back in 1996. Victories on this scale have happened in the relatively recent past and the other party fought its way back.
That said, it is undoubtedly true that the Liberals need to do something to expand their appeal. One commentator on the ABC said something that seemed apt - that increasingly the Liberals are the party of the boomers and only the boomers. That is not sufficient to win an election now. In particular they need to find a way back to winning urban voters, and aspirational migrant communities as well.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I wonder how much this is due to Peter Dutton's personal brand being terrible? He is famously off-putting on the individual or human level, and his flailing election campaign didn't help matters.
In some ways Albo has been very fortunate here - running against ScoMo and then Dutton means that, for two elections in a row, he's been able to take a small target strategy and focus on getting his opponent into the spotlight as much as possible.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Hm, I'm not sure how much I follow the categories that you're using. Australia doesn't really have what I would call a MAGA base. If you're looking for blood-and-soil types, well, firstly a lot of indigenous people are just straightforwardly blood-and-soil in their approach, but presumably they don't count, so secondly you're looking at One Nation and the nativists.
The thing is, the constituency for Australian nativism is somewhat complicated. Over 30% of Australia's population was born overseas, and because we have compulsory voting, all those people turn out. So you can't win an election just with people born here. Fortunately, the One Nation position isn't that immigrants simpliciter are bad - they tend to distinguish along the lines of culture, or less charitably, race. Nobody cares about English immigrants, for instance. They're where Australia comes from in the first place. Likewise we don't care about, say, New Zealand migrants, which are actually very common anyway. (Long story short, if you're an even slightly ambitious young New Zealander and seek opportunity, you come to Australia. And we're fine with that.) One Nation complained about being 'swamped by Asians' in the 90s, and today they're more likely to complain about Islamic immigration. The idea is hostility to people who don't share Australian values or a common cultural identity. Thus, for instance, around 70% of Australians are in favour of open borders with Canada, New Zealand, and Britain. We perceive ourselves as pretty closely connected to all of them.
(It will be interesting to see if demographic changes in Canada alter popular opinion on that, but I digress.)
At any rate, think of the right-wing 'blood and soil' position in Australia to not be 'Australians only', but rather 'Australians and the countries we like only', with the understanding that 'countries we like' means basically the white parts of the British Empire. People who take this view too explicitly will probably be accused of wanting to re-enact the White Australia Policy.
To Trump specifically -
I sometimes think of Australia as being the most America-like country that isn't America. (I would say we beat out Canada only because Canadian identity is specifically formed by not being American. They have a much more intentional sense of resistance against America.) However, there are still important differences, and I think the big one is probably that America has a very different idea of greatness or success to us. You couldn't have 'Make Australia Great Again' as a slogan because we don't have that kind of ambition or pride. That's not how we think of Australia. However, the American influence on our political tradition is significant - while structurally we are a Westminister democracy and the UK is the biggest influence on us, the framers of the Australian constitution read and were significantly (but not slavishly) inspired by the American effort. If you look into Australian patriotic writing from the late 19th and early 20th century, there is a strong feeling that we can use America as a model, or that Australia can be a kind of 'second America' (only loyal this time). Then you have to add to that, of course, the American alliance that has persisted since the Second World War, and we do just look to America for a lot.
This means that when anything in America reads well or sympathetically to the Australian electorate, politicians suddenly get keen on copying it; and likewise when anything in America reads unsympathetically, politicians need to struggle to distance themselves from it. In the past the Coalition has been more vocally pro-America than Labor, and have had close relationships with the Republican party. John Howard made a big show of his friendship with George Bush, for instance, and while it's been a bit more complicated since then, you can see how proud ScoMo was to be next to Biden. (And Biden apparently forgetting his name caused a minor scandal.)
So the issue for Peter Dutton in particular is - the Coalition has generally marketed itself as pro-America, or closer to America than Labor (which has instead been quietly proud of rebuilding our relationship with China). Dutton has also experimented a bit with American-style culture politics, and generally is perceived as a more 'American' politician.
And that seemed to be going well up until Trump lashed out with tariffs, and while we only received the lightest of American tariffs, Trump also refused to give us an exemption (which he had done in his first term). Add in that Trump's self-aggrandising, bullying style of politics plays very badly with an Australian culture that tends to prefer humility and self-deprecation and America's brand is currently in the toilet.
Dutton gets some of the overflow from the hatred of Trump. He and his party are too close to Trump and too close to America. When it comes to foreign policy, I suspect voters currently want a leader who will stand up to America.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
A billionaire who is pretty much in it for the entertainment value. He's rich and he likes being on TV and having his face on billboards.
Trumpet of Patriots in general is a good case study in why Trumpism doesn't work in Australia. They are copying Trump-style campaigning while making zero adaptation to the local context and it is pretty miserable.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Australians who are interested in politics are pretty much bound to follow American politics, at least in the vague outline. I'd guess that your average person on the street either doesn't know who Tucker Carlson is, or knows him only as some pundit in America. Among Australians who take an active interest in politics, I'd expect much higher recognition.
I would not expect Carlson's endorsement (or disendorsement) to have any significant impact on Australian politics, though. If anything, I expect that his endorsement would hurt a candidate. We have a federal election tomorrow where it looks like what would have been a very winnable election for the Coalition has turned into a disaster, substantially due to Trump. Trump and MAGA-style voices are widely hated over here and any association with them is more likely to harm than to hurt. It's not as bad here as in Canada, but it's still true, I think, that Trump has been a disaster for conservative parties throughout the wider Anglosphere.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Let me rephrase. Let's consider the possible options here, for someone who is genuinely fascinated by fascist thinkers from the 20s and 30s:
You don't call yourself a fascist. Either: 1) people identify you as a fascist anyway, into the ghetto you go, or 2) people don't identify you as a fascist but you're an obscure weirdo interested in irrelevant niche thinkers from a hundred years ago and get zero attention.
You do call yourself a fascist. Either: 1) people immediately associate you with Hitler and you lose all credibility, or 2) your pseudointellectual protestations of not being that kind of fascist lead to endless obscure hair-splitting that stand in the way of any wide appeal.
The problem is that there is no way forward for this kind of movement. The Hitler/Nazi/fascist brand is completely tainted. It does not work, and no amount of hair-splitting about different kinds of fascism or fascist-adjacent politics suffices to defend you.
The people closest to that space who are most successful - think Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, and AfD - have gotten there by vocally distancing themselves from any fascist associations and condemning them. Jean-Marie Le Pen was unelectable; Marine broke up his coalition and condemned his positions and allies. Meloni has distanced herself from and condemned the idea of fascism. If you call yourself fascist, or if you can be credibly accused of fascism, you are stuffed. The most successful nationalist right movements, even the ones that have some genealogical links to fascist movements, have needed to powerfully disassociate themselves from fascism and fascist thinkers.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
This is going another direction, I suppose, but I also find Hitler an odd choice if your goal is to rehabilitate far-right authoritarianism in a general sense, and if you're not interested specifically in Jews or Germany. There would also seem to be plenty of great examples from the same period - you could always idealise Mussolini or perhaps Dollfuss, but if they're too much of failures for you, there's still Franco or Salazar. If you allow yourself to include thinkers, there are plenty of far-right writers and thinkers in the 20s and 30s who don't have Hitler's baggage.
I recall once knowing someone who identified openly as 'a fascist', but immediately qualified that to explain that she's anti-Hitlerite, and is instead more along Dollfuss' lines, and took heavy inspiration from José Antonio Primo de Rivera. It's possible to adopt a fascist-ish position along those lines, while resolutely condemning anti-semitism.
The problem, I suppose, is that that doesn't get you attention. The moment you say the F-word you are associated with Hitler whether you like it or not, and if you don't say it, well, you're just some weirdo enthusiast for a bunch of obscure thinkers no one's ever heard of. It's optimising for being unique and special in the vast terrain of weird internet politics nerds, rather than for appealing to real people or building any kind of movement.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
Well, I suspect that a Germany that went communist in the 20s or 30s would also end up on the losing side of a world war. A communist Germany, it seems to me, would be likely to feud with Russia over who the de facto leader of European communism is. The Soviets were very invested in that, and they would rather a foreign communist movement fail than turn into a rival to them - as with Spain, for instance, where they prioritised defeating left-wing rivals over defeating the Nationalists. Communist Germany likely either gets absorbed into the Soviet sphere, or it has to fight to prevent it. That's either an earlier GDR, or it's a world war. Neither outcome seems particularly rosy for Germany.
Is either worse than our WWII? I really don't know. It's very difficult to speculate about counterfactuals, especially in a case like WWII where we might have to weigh up competing moral intuitions. Suppose OTL-WWII is on average better for all Germans, but far, far worse for German Jews, whereas AU-communist-Germany is on average worse for all Germans, but German Jews are only a little bit worse than average. A strict calculation of utility favours OTL-WWII, but it's also singled out a small minority for especial suffering. How do you weight that in your calculation? Does it matter? Does it not? I know that to me it feels rather icky to say that I'd prefer the timeline which is slightly better for everyone but which requires throwing a minority group that I'm not in under the bus.
(Maybe it makes a difference that in this alternate history, we, in addition to not having a Holocaust, also probably don't have Israel either. From a Jewish perspective, is it better or worse to never found the state of Israel? Another question that depends a lot on your values.)
OliveTapenade
17d ago
Yes, you don't have to deny the Holocaust to assert that communism was worse than fascism. They - or at least, the Nazi and Leninist/Stalinist incarnations thereof - were both unquestionably genocidal, and killed millions of innocents.
That's the one about a detective uncovering the Holocaust?
One of the questions I would have about that scenario is whether the Holocaust happens at all. The Nazis began it on a large scale only after 1942, and they were aware that the Western Allies would be opposed - that was why they hid it, and why Himmler, purely out of self-preservation, tried to reverse course when it was obvious the war was lost. If Germany is allied with the Western powers, potentially receiving Lend-Lease style aid against the Russians, and is interested in maintaining good relations with the Allies after the war, there's a chance that they're rational enough to not attempt it.
I don't think the Nazis are that rational, but if we're positing a world where the Nazis are allied with the West, we're already positing Nazis significantly more rational and more restrained than the real ones. After the Battle of France there's no very realistic chance, I think, of the UK and US turning around and becoming pro-German, and Hitler was aggressive by disposition. I don't see Hitler restraining his ambitions, either internationally (re: not attacking or conciliating the West) or domestically (re: not attempting to exterminate the Jews). Right up to the beginning of WWII, Hitler's foreign policy was generally to make aggressive demands, daring his enemies to call his bluff, and they rarely did. The Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, etc., all convinced him that making extreme demands paid off, and he continued with that strategy with Poland, France, and then proactively invading Russia in a way that even the highly paranoid Stalin had not expected that early. So an alternate world in which Hitler doesn't pick all these fights is already changing a fair bit.
Of course, you might think an emphasis on Hitler's character is misplaced relative to structural factors - there's the economic case for the war from The Wages of Destruction. But if we follow that case, one of the primary German concerns is dependence on economic networks dominated by Britain and America (and implicitly the Jewish bankers who run them), which seems like it would discourage Nazi Germany from relying too much on their aid. In that situation I'd expect the German aim to be effectively to scam as much resources from the West as possible, use them to conquer the East, and then turn back against the West again - which perhaps gets us back to the 'Cold War with Nazi Europe' scenario.
However, I think the next complicating factor there is Japan. Japan isn't particularly invested in the European front, and the Japanese are probably going to attack the British and the Americans in the Pacific. So we need to posit a timeline in which the Germans junk their alliance with Japan, or potentially one where the Japanese don't attack the British and Americans. So maybe we need another butterfly? The Japanese win at Khalkhin Gol and settle on Strike North?
OliveTapenade
18d ago
I suppose to be fair I've misunderstood you a little - the hypothetical anti-communist here does not have to take the position that Hitler is a maximally effective anti-communist, or even good in any respect.
Reading you again, I think the case would be something like this. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were similarly bad. Stalin was around as bad as Hitler if not more so. In OTL, the liberal West allied with the Soviets to defeat the Nazis. Hypothetically, the liberal West could have allied instead with the Nazis to defeat the Soviets. Given that the Nazis and Soviets were similarly bad, this hypothetical world is not obviously worse than the one we actually live in. Even if the result is a Cold War against Nazi Europe rather than against the greater Eastern bloc, is that actually worse?
I don't think I'm convinced by that argument, but I'm open to hearing it. I think I'd want to delve a lot more into what that alternate history would look like, and I have questions regarding how much the Allies moderate hypothetical-alternate-Germany versus how much alternate-Germany influences the Allies, but it would be a real discussion.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
I feel like the widespread availability of other anti-communist icons means that I would still be quite suspicious of someone who claims to admire Hitler on purely anti-communist grounds.
That is, 1) there are countless other figures you could choose, so the choice of Hitler specifically, given all his other baggage, causes me to wonder about the person's motives, 2) Hitler failed to stop the communists and his tenure ended with a self-inflicted bullet wound to his own head while the hammer and sickle flew over the Reichstag; why not hold up a successful anti-communist instead?, and 3) it seems like most of the obvious reasons why someone would hate communism should also incline one to hate Hitler and Nazism. Do you hate tyrannical governments? Eccentric dictators who kill millions of their own people? Totalitarianism, or rule by terror? The over-centralisation of power and destruction of both political and civic liberty? It seems like most of the convictions that would plausibly make you anti-communist, at least in the 21st century, would make you anti-Nazi as well.
So if I met somebody who was vocally sympathising with Hitler on the basis of anti-communism, I think I would still raise an eyebrow, to say the least.
I think the best case scenario for unironc admirers of Hitler, for me, would be the number of colonial or post-colonial leaders outside the West who've been fond of him. The narrative there is fairly straightforward - he was a nationalist leader of a country defeated by the Western powers who embarked on self-strengthening projects. It does not hurt that postcolonial leaders themselves are often dictators and therefore more inclined to judge another dictator positively. Add in that many such leaders either don't know and don't care about Jews at all (e.g. East Asian leaders), or have some level of anti-semitism themselves (e.g. Arab leaders), and that part isn't decisive for them.
This is a nitpick, but I feel obligated to note that no, it wasn't. In Genesis 2:7, the first man is formed out of the dust of the ground. The Bible does not say that men were created ex nihilo, but in fact says the explicit opposite. I would gently suggest that if you want to seriously engage with Christian thought on a complex issue, you may wish to start by familiarising yourself with what Christian texts actually say.
Is this a nitpick? Is it not massively germane to your point? No, perhaps not, and if you want to look for all the ways in which Genesis 1-2 are not a scientifically accurate account of abiogenesis, you'll succeed. But then it is hardly the case that Christians, even long before Darwin, have understood it that way. Thinkers as older as Augustine, in 401, have understood that this narrative is not to be understood in that sense. Likewise Calvin, again prior to modern science, frankly writes "that nothing here is treated of but the visible form of the world" and adds "He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere". As with astronomy, so with biology.
You may condemn Augustine and Calvin as adding epicycles, but I would say, rather, that the burden of proof lies with your assumption that the only reasonable way to understand Genesis is as a historico-scientific account of the origin of the universe. It seems to me that as Christians have taken other approaches, even many centuries before modern science, it is by no means obvious that that's the natural reading of it. My view, actually, is that the automatic reading of Genesis as scientific is itself a kind of modern debasement, an error characteristic of post-Enlightenment thinkers.
Now to the rest...
I actually don't find the Riddle of Epicurus particularly overwhelming here, not least because the Riddle predates Christianity by many centuries, and in fact the Problem of Evil is itself voiced with great eloquence and force in the Hebrew scriptures themselves. Confronting the earliest Christians with the fact of evil, in the face of God's omnipotence, would not surprise or challenge them in the slightest, and the difficulty that humans have understanding evil was as familiar to them as it is to us.
What I would say is that Christian faith does, in a sense, require the belief that there is some kind of answer to the Problem of Evil, even if we do not know it. And that in itself is not absurd. If we have good reason to believe that God exists and is benevolent, and yet we observe evil, it would seem to follow that there must be some kind of reason for evil. We need not be able to articulate that reason in order to believe that there must be one. The question has an answer, even if we do not know it. Christianity does not declare that there are no mysteries.
Thus, say, Peter van Inwagen's response to the Problem of Evil is what he calls a 'defense' rather than an 'theodicy'. He writes:
This much, I think, may be required of the Christian - not that they prove that this-or-that theodicy is true, but merely to prove that it is conceivably possible that evil may, for now, exist in a universe created and governed by a benevolent God. The bar required is reasonable doubt.
It seems to me that my justifications for understanding God to exist are sufficiently strong, and the possible explanations for evil's existence sufficiently many, that Epicurus' Riddle does not snuff out my bright candle.
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